America’s dirty, bloody war is coming home

Insanity, said Nietzsche, in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Of course, the 19th century German philosopher didn’t live long enough to see the rise of the United States as a nation and superpower and its decay into a mindless consumerist society where insanity – among individuals and groups – has become a rule. In March, after a loony bunch of American marines descended on a Afghan village at mid-night and shot dead men, women and children — all sleeping in their poor houses after a day’s of hard work, there was no outrage in America, no candle-light vigils, no flowers and no trauma. Nobody felt bad for the Afghan children shot in the head while dreaming, probably smiling in their sleep, dying in the embrace of their mothers.

The Afghans kept saying that there were several men who went on a shooting spree at Panjwal, a small village, and wiped out families and entire clans but the US army caught just one man – a bad apple, as always. They couldn’t afford the incident to look like a well-planned massacre by US sodiers; it had to be sole act of an individual gone off his rocker. A lone gunman is America’s alibi for the worst crimes committed at home and abroad. Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John Lennon – anybody who dared to take on the Establishment — and expose America’s dirty truths — was taken down by a “deranged” man “acting on his own”. It’s amazing how all those “mentally ill” assassins managed to get guns, slip through security cordons, reach close enough to important people and shoot their carefully chosen targets – always a leftist or a liberal, and never a right-wing fanatic.

But now, in the past two decades, the lone-gunman-acting-on-his-own story has taken a twist. More than 4,000 people have been killed in mass shootouts in America in recent years. Spree killings are so common in the US now that it doesn’t make headlines for more than 24 hours. Even before people come to terms with a day-light massacre, another one happens. And it all happens in the suburbs – the quiet, leafy neighbourhoods where everybody should know everybody else. But America’s suburbs are troubled. Way back in 1988, J G Ballard, the British writer predicted the future to a journalist friend. “I think that’s where the future is going – a suburban calm coexisting with terrific volatility, as when the local shopping centre is suddenly destroyed by a maniac with a mail-order Kalashnikov.”

In the past two weeks, two suburban maniacs – the Batman killer of Colorado who emerged like a ghost from a dark fantasy and riddled with bullets the people watching movies; and the hate-filled shooter of Wisconsin, a US army veteran who walked into a Sikh shrine and pumped bullets into people preparing for morning prayers – have proved once again that insanity is a rule in America. It’s insanity because despite these killings happening at regular intervals, America will not do anything about it. No American leader – least of all President Obama – has enough courage to dump the right “to bear arms” or make it an issue in the coming elections, and innocent people will continue to fall to bullets.

The problem is much deeper. America is a violent nation which maintains order at home with guns and dictates policies to other countries through the barrel of gun. After the Batman shooting incident, Michael Moore, director of Bowling for Columbine, a 2002 documentary about the culture of firearms and violence that drew its title from an earlier shooting in Colorado, hit the nail on the head as he said he “sees continued violence until the world has its fill of us”. “I believe anthropologists and historians will look back on us and simply conclude that we were a violent nation, at home and abroad..,” Moore said.

The world – from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan – already has had enough of America. Millions of people – mostly innocent citizens – have been felled by American bullets in Asia since the end of the second world war. But they don’t care. Since Obama came to power in 2008, the US has started six new wars in different continents. At home, the Americans are obsessed with racial profiling and the “potential” threats from Islamic groups. The Colorado killer was under psychiatric treatment and he bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition online but he didn’t raise an alarm. Is it because he was a white boy? The Wisconsin shooter was a regular at a group singing hate songs and a known member of a neo-Nazi club but no one suspected him of doing anything wrong. Is it because he was a white guy who had served in the US army? This despite the fact that before 9/11 the biggest terror attack in the US – Oklahoma bombing – was carried out by a white terrorist group. Imagine what would have happened if a black American or an American with a Muslim name had bought 6,000 bullets or participated in a hate congregation?

The Americans love their guns and the gun culture as far as it’s in the hands of right people — the white American male. Never before in the history of mankind, there has been a country that has inflicted so much violence domestically and on the world at large. With its economy in turmoil and world domination in decline, America’s violence – at home and abroad – is going to accelerate like nobody’s business. Gore Vidal, one of my favourite writers who passed away recently, knew where America was headed. “I should not in the least be surprised if there were a kind of dictatorship at the end of the road, which seems to be coming more and more quickly as we lose more and more wars…,” Vidal, one of the last intellectuals of America, said in a recent interview. And the old fox, who never minced his words, knew why America would ease into a dictatorship. “The people with the most authority in America are the people with guns.”

Guns are an esential part of their culture. Hollywood films are all about guns, bullets and blood. America’s comic book heroes are all vigilantes who have the licence to kill with impunity. And in their video games, small children are supposed to hunt and kill “bad guys”, who generally look like foreigners. Wherever in the world they have an interest – economic and political, they send men with guns — violent men trained to shoot and kill first and ask questions or engage in talks later. Drilling holes in other people’s lands for oil and gas and pumping bullets into innocent civilians for political control has been America’s business abroad for the past 50 years or so.

But now America’s dirty, ugly, bloody wars are coming home. As it fails to deal with its financial meltdown and its small cities begin to look like ghost towns, more and more Americans are realizing that they can’t make it there anymore. And they have guns. As the joker said in the Batman movie, “The real test of society comes when things stop to work. It’s then that people begin to snap…”

Actually America lost its balance a long time ago. At 23 million, it has the highest number of prisoners in the world. As of 2009, the incarceration rate was 743 per 100,000 of population. Also, according to surveys, more than half of Americans will develop a mental illness at some point in their lives, often beginning in childhood or adolescence. An estimated 26.2% of Americans of 18 years and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year..

In recent months, there has been a spurt in mass shootings at malls, markets, restaurant, theatres and temples. And it’s all very normal. Every shootout is followed by a routine on TV – trauma of victims’ family and friends, flowers, candles and meaningless debates. Nobody has the courage to say that we need to lock up and destroy these guns. But how can America live without guns? How can they dominate the world without guns? In George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, journalist Edward Murrow had given a warning to America: “We can’t expect to protect freedom at home while violating it abroad…”

With its violence and policies, America has violated the freedoms of other peoples for a very long time. Now the chickens are coming home to roost…

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Shobhan Saxena is a Sao Paulo-based journalist. An editor with Sunday Times of India before moving to Brazil, he now reports on politics, trade, culture, music and, of course, football. Though Shobhan's interests range from international issues, human rights and politics to art & culture, what really fascinates him is the extraordinary lives of ordinary people - the men and women on the street, their lives and their views on everything under the sun. Here, he tries to capture small slices of those colourful lives in Brazil and other South American countries.
Shobhan Saxena tweets
@shobhansaxena
You can also see his news feeds at
www.facebook.com/shobhan.saxena

Shobhan Saxena is a Sao Paulo-based journalist. An editor with Sunday Times of India before moving to Brazil, he now reports on politics, trade, culture, mu. . .

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Author

Shobhan Saxena is a Sao Paulo-based journalist. An editor with Sunday Times of India before moving to Brazil, he now reports on politics, trade, culture, music and, of course, football. Though Shobhan's interests range from international issues, human rights and politics to art & culture, what really fascinates him is the extraordinary lives of ordinary people - the men and women on the street, their lives and their views on everything under the sun. Here, he tries to capture small slices of those colourful lives in Brazil and other South American countries.
Shobhan Saxena tweets
@shobhansaxena
You can also see his news feeds at
www.facebook.com/shobhan.saxena

Shobhan Saxena is a Sao Paulo-based journalist. An editor with Sunday Times of India before moving to Brazil, he now reports on politics, trade, culture, mu. . .